learning curve

Access beginners often become discouraged when they start to realized that the learning curve is actually quite long and involved. “Learning Access” is quite unlike other learning they may have experienced. Frequently a question that seems to be quite simple leads to several other questions at a more fundamental level. Each of those questions can lead to yet additional even more fundamental questions.

background knowledge and skills

Frequently “learning Access” as in learning how to manipulate things within the Access environment, is only part of the issue. I can teach you the simple mechanics of designing and creating forms and reports from the perspective of how they will look, the size and relative position of their components in a few hours. Those skills, however, barely scratch the surface of “learning Access.”

Identifying the right tool for the job is an important skill that can save you hours of frustration and wasted effort. To identify the right tool you first need to understand the job, then you need to understand the possible tools. The Crabby Office Lady has an article with some guidelines about whether Access or Excel would be the better tool for particular jobs.

Think of it this way. I can teach you to use a calculator, how to press the keys to make numbers appear on the display and how to press the operator keys to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, reasonably quickly. But, unless you know what combination of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division you will need to apply to solve your immediate problem, knowing how to use a calculator, how to punch numbers, won’t really help you much.

Access is like that on a grand scale. Unless you learn or already know, how to analyze data, and organize it according to relational data design principles, knowing how to create a table and add fields to it, won’t get you very far. Unless you learn, or already understand, the math behind the business problems you want a database to help with, knowing how to create calculated controls on forms and reports also won’t get you very far.

Not every database involves arithmetic calculations, of course, but there are many skills that go into developing a database application that go far beyond merely having “learned Access".”

learning by doing

There is nothing quite like experiential learning to build and enhance a permanent knowledge base. Identify a problem and then work at devising a solution. Unfortunately, if you are doing your experiential learning all on your own, what you learn and what may become a permanent part of your skill set, may not always be the best or even the ‘right’ way to solve your problem.

Experiential learning can also be a frustrating process. You may run into roadblocks that, once you have overcome them, seem to be quite inconsequential but, until they are overcome, stop you dead in your tracks. Sometimes the solution is a simple as missed dot or a missing space.

courses

There are a number of on-line or DVD based courses available. However, as good as their content may be, such courses, are unable to rephrase or modify how they explain topics in response to questions you may have. If you run into a concept that you have difficulty understanding, you may find yourself beating your head against the proverbial stone wall if an on-line or DVD course is your only learning resource.

I have to confess that I have a somewhat biased opinion when it comes to computer training courses. I facilitate instructor led training sessions for Office applications. I believe that such courses have a distinct advantage over on-line or DVD courses precisely because learners can ask questions, can say, “I don’t understand that point,” and the trainer or instructor can rephrase the explanation, suggest alternative analogies, or otherwise help the learner overcome hurdles in a timely fashion.

Check out courses that may be available through your local community college or other adult training facilities. If you live in or near my part of the world (north-eastern Ontario, Canada, pay a visit to The Enterprise Centre Computer Software Training & Development web page to see details on the training sessions we offer there.

Quote of the Day
Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.
–Ludwig van Beethoven

print resources

Even in today’s electronic age, hardcopy books and articles can be excellent learning resources. I have found that no one book is the best for me. Where one book or author may do an excellent job on many topics, there may be other topics that one particular author or book does not touch or explains in a way that isn’t clear to me. Reading a different author’s treatment of the same subject frequently gets me on track.

In the recommended reading section below, I have listed two books that I have found helpful in understanding Access and what it can do.

on-line resources

In the past, newsgroups, and more recently on-line forums are excellent learning resources where you can ask questions about specific problems you are having and get helpful answers and suggestions. Although you may have to register in order to post questions, many on-line forums are free. In fact, I suggest you try the free forums first. Again, my bias may be showing, but one of the best Access forums is UtterAccess.com, where I am an administrator. George Hepworth, author of one of the books recommended below and several of the co-authors of the other book are UtterAccess members, moderators, or administrators, and frequent posters at UtterAccess.

recommended reading

George Hepworth’s Grover Park George on Access is a good introduction to relational database concepts in simple layperson’s language. If you are already comfortable with relational concepts and want to see more of Access in Action, you might find Microsoft Access Small Business Solutions a worthwhile read.

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Even the best design in the world sometimes needs some revisions and tweaking when we start to develop queries and reports. Feedback from the Output phase of the process sometimes sends us back to revise and refine some aspect of the design.

The query at the end of part 2 is a good example of this. As is, that query can only provide the id of a representative, not the representative’s actual name. So we need to add a another table, tblHumanResources  to the query.  This change enables the query to provide representative names for the report.

Rather than including the three representative name fields in the query grid, the first column of the query is defined by a calculation: Representative: [hrlname] & ", " & [HrFName] & " " & [hrmname].

All that remains now is to design the actual report.

Building the detail section of the report is simply a matter of dragging and dropping fields form the field list in the correct position. The naming convention described in part 2 helps ensure that the fields are situated in correct product column and weekday Sales or Quotation  row. While the field names obscure the actual product name.

Because there are multiple controls for each product in two different categories, individual addition expressions must be created in order to display weekly totals for both Sales and Quotations. For example the expression for the weekly sales total for Widgets is:

=Int([SAPr1_MO])+Int([SAPr1_TU])+Int([SAPr1_WE])+Int([SAPr1_TH])+Int([SAPr1_FR])

Here again, the naming convention make it easy to create the expressions for each product without a lot of typing. After creating the first control (for product 1 – widgets) and typing the expression as its data source, simply make five copies. Edit the data source for each product total in turn and replace the ‘1’ with ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, ‘5’, or ‘6’, depending on the product. This technique will also work for the Quotations totals.

After adding all the controls, adding appropriate labels then formatting and aligning them, and setting up report grouping on Representative, this is what the final report looks like:

You should keep in mind that, because queries are limited to a maximum of 255 fields, this approach will only work if 255 or fewer ‘cells’ required in the report details. This report has 60 ‘cell’ (6 products x 5 days x 2 categories) so it is will within the limit. 

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• who made the sale or quotation
• what product was involved
• was the action a sale or a quotation?
• when did it happened

These descriptions suggest the need for certain tables:

• salespeople
• product lines
• sales activity
• sales activity types

Here’s how the tables are organized in the database:

Obviously this is a minimal structure designed to illustrate what’s needed for the reports. The Human Resource table has only three name fields whereas in a real application much more information about people would be required.

The data is normalized to the third normal form. The problem here is to create a report from a flattened version of the data. The client’s requirements in part one specified that the report require one column for each product group sales on one row followed by a similar row or product group quotations. Keeping in mind also that the desired report should have some vertical space between each pair or rows and that there be one pair of rows for each day of the week, it should be apparent that a simple datasheet or even a continuous report will not meet these requirements.

Before designing the actual report it is first necessary to flatten the data. Crosstab queries are specifically designed to do exactly that. The data we will need in the query includes the sale representative, the date, the type of action, and the number of times the action happened on each day. So the basic crosstab design will look like this:

Notice that the query has included a field to restrict the results to a particular time frame (July 26 – 30, 2010). In this example the criterion has been hard-coded. In a working database the query would most likely refer to a user-specified time frame from a form or memory value.

What’s missing from this query, however, is any sort of specification of the activity type (sale or quotation) and the relevant day of the week. To further refine the specification, it is necessary to add two additional Where fields to the query.

Actually, in order to report on each product for each day of the week, a total of ten queries will be needed (5 days x 2 action types.) Before creating these queries, however, it will speed things up greatly if you specify column headings in the  queries properties. (Remember that cross-tab data has to have pre-defined column headings if the data is to be used in a report.

This basic query is only needed as a model for the queries that will ultimately be used in the report. By setting the query up with as much generic detail as possible, you can quickly create the ten queries simply by modifying the product and day of week criteria and using save as repeatedly for each set of criteria.  Subsequent work with the queries will be much easier if you use a consistent naming style for these day/product queries.

The names used in the example database are:

Sales queries: Monday to Friday

• qxtbActivity_SA_MO
• qxtbActivity_SA_TU
• qxtbActivity_SA_WE
• qxtbActivity_SA_TH
• qxtbActivity_SA_FR

Quotation Queries: Monday to Friday

• qxtbActivity_QU_MO
• qxtbActivity_QU_TU

• qxtbActivity_QU_WE

• qxtbActivity_QU_TH

• qxtbActivity_QU_FR

Notice how these names follow a consistent pattern. The names all begin with qxtbActivity, indicating that the query is a crosstab of the Activity tab. The next two characters after the first underscore indicates whether the query is retrieving sales or quotation data. The final two indicators indicate the weekday that data represents. Using consistent naming patterns like this simplifies both the creation and identification of the queries. For example, you can use a text editor to search and replace the distinguishing characters to create the other queries in the set.

These queries will return the sales and quotation date for each sales rep for each day on which each rep, respectively, had activity. However, in the unlikely event that a rep had no sales or no quotation activity, that rep will be missing from the days sales or quotation data or both. What we really need is for the rep to be included in the query output with zeros for each product column.

What we need is a list of sales reps who were active in the reporting period. A simple query of representatives in the activity table grouped by rep with a criteria limiting the date range will do the trick. The SQL of the query is:

SELECT tblActivity.Rep
FROM tblActivity
WHERE (((tblActivity.ActDate) Between #7/26/2010# And #7/30/2010#))
GROUP BY tblActivity.Rep;

Now this query can be joined to each of the crosstabs to produce a set of ten selection queries. These queries all follow a similar pattern and use an outer join to ensure that all representatives will be included whether or not they have sales.

In these queries, the product names have been “aliased” so that they can be distinguished as to sales or quotations on a day by day. Again a consistent naming pattern helps speed up the creation process. For example, QUPr1_MO is the alias for Monday’s Widget quotations and SAPr1_MO is the alias for Monday’s Widget sales. The Pr1 simply indicates that this is the first field of products which is widget data. The queries themselves are names “qsel” followed by the part of the crosstab name after “qxtb”

For example, the query in the diagram above is named qselActivity_QU_MO, indicating that it will provide data for the Monday column of the report.

We need one more query to give us the data that the report will display. Think of this as an umbrella query that will combine the results of the ten queries just created into a single query:

The order of the sub queries doesn’t matter much but it will be easier to work with query when designing the report if the field list are arranged left to right, Monday to Friday. Each table should be joined to the table on its right by the Rep field. In this diagram the field list are arranged in two rows simply to make it easier to display in this article. In the actual query, qselActivity_QU_MO is to the right of qselActivity_SA_FR.

The final query has 61 columns – rep plus one column for each of the SAPr… and QUPr… fields.

In the final part of this series we will see how to display this query data in a grid format grouped by representative.

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In the organization requesting the report, sales people generate quotations and sales for each of the company’s six main product lines. (In case you haven’t guessed, the product lines here have fictitious names.) The client wanted a weekly activity report that showed the number of quotations and sale for each salesperson for each product.

What clinched the decision that this report needed a data management solution and not a spreadsheet solution was that client wanted other, similar reports, that summarized data over time. In order to produce such on-going reports, sales and quotation histories had to be maintained.

Choosing the best data manager for the job is a whole other decision process. Suffice it to say that, in this case, Access was determined to be adequate for the client’s business volume.

As you may or may not know, relational database management systems (RDMS) work best if the data is properly normalized. The mock-up above shows the data laid out in what some refer to as a flat-file format. The layout seems natural and easy to understand and that is how most people envision their data should be set up in a database.

Sadly, therein lies a trap however. Flat file organization is very inefficient and error prone, in part because there is a lot of repetition of data values. One of the goals or normalized tables, on the other hand, is the elimination of data repetition.

In short, there is a simple rule of thumb that applies here, To get the report right, first get the data right.

In part 2, I will illustrate the normalized structure for the data used in the report.

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The Start Menu search box provides another way to search for your digital content, whether the content you are trying to find is an application (program) or a document (`data`file.) You don’t have to remember the application you used to create the file (if it is a document) or even the full name of what you are looking for. In fact you can even search for a particular phrase.

You will see the search box at the bottom or the start menu, when you click the Start Button. Simply click into the search box and start to type the first few letters of the name of the item you are looking for.

Can’t recall the actual name? All is not lost  as long as you can recall at least part of the name or a distinctive phrase in the document’s content.

Type in what you recall. Windows immediately starts looking for matches in its indexes. The more characters you type, the more refined the search will be.

Here’s an example. I did some work a while ago on a demonstration of the critical path for a project management seminar I facilitate. There were several files involved but I couldn’t recall their exact names. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a critical path is. The point here is that I was able to use the search box to track down the files I needed.

In the graphic, you can see that I typed ‘critical path’ into the search box. Notice how the search utility has returned a list of several documents.

The list includes a folder I created to house the relevant files, an html (web page) file, some Excel files, and two OneNote notebooks which made some reference to my search phrase, ‘critical path.’ Some of the document names include the phrase, ‘critical path.’ Some do not, but somewhere in these documents, the phrase ‘critical path’ appears and so they appear in the list of search results.

In Windows 7 – Libraries, I discussed the virtual explosion in electronic storage capacity. The downside of large storage capacity is that it is easy to save a file one day and then not recall where you located it when you need to work with it several days, weeks, or months later. Try the search box the next time a file eludes you. It will quickly become a valued friend.

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In Windows XP you could pin shortcuts to your favourite applications to the start menu. Windows 7 has taken that concept a couple of steps further. I’m lumping the discussion of this set of Windows enhancement under the title Pinning Applications to the Task Bar because I became aware of that capability before I found that Start Menu shortcuts share some features with taskbar shortcuts.

Windows XP had a Recent Documents folder on the Start menu. Well-behaved applications added the name of each document you worked on with the application. That way it was possible to re-open recent work without a lot of hunting. Recent Documents worked well enough, unless, you worked a larger number of different of, say, Word documents, regularly and perhaps only the occasional Excel Workbook.  In situations like that, the Excel Workbook may have been forced off the Recent Documents list because the list contained a large number of Word and other non-excel entries. In that case, it took just a bit longer to open the file you want to work with because you would first have to open the application and then locate the document you want in the application’s internal recent documents list.

In Windows 7, if you pin an application to the task bar, you will always see a shortcut to the application on the task bar. You don’t have to have it pinned to the start menu (although you can, if you wish). The secret lies in right clicking the application icon on the Task Bar.

The graphic shows the shortcut menu I get when I right-click the Excel icon that I have pinned to the taskbar. Notice that the list is divided into three parts. The recent section lists the last few Excel workbooks I have worked on. Just as with the Windows XP Recent Documents folder, this list can fill up so that if I work on enough different workbooks, the one I want may no longer appear in this list.

That’s where the top section comes into play. Right now, I have three workbooks pinned to My Excel recent documents list. I edit the Spammers one almost daily so it is not likely to disappear. The other two, on the other had, I may not need to work with for extended periods. I have pinned them to this menu by right-clicking on the one I want and selecting Pin to the list. You don’t even need to right click an entry to pin it. When you point you mouse at an entry, you will see a push-pin icon on the right. Click that icon and the document is immediately pinned to the list.

In my opinion, this feature is a great innovation. Instead of having a single Recent Documents folder, Windows 7 gives you separate recent document lists, each dedicated to a single application.

This idea carries over to the Start Menu. However, instead of requiring you to right click an application icon, the list is available as a cascaded menu that appears when you hover over a Start menu item. Look of the little black triangle to the right of the application name.

Here is a graphic of my Start Menu where I have hovered my mouse over the Microsoft Excel entry. Notice that this is the same recent documents list that I opened by right-clicking the Excel taskbar icon.

On a document by document basis, the application pinning and dedicated recent documents lists feature of Windows 7 won’t save you much time per document. But if you work on a large number of different documents from a variety of applications, those tiny per document savings can add up leaving your more time to do productive work on your documents and less time just trying to track theme down so you can work on them.

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Electronic Storage is More Affordable than Ever

Personal data storage costs have plummeted over the years. I recall receiving a promotional flyer in 1985 promoting a 5 Megabyte hard drive for $5,000.00. In today’s dollars that price translates to a bit over $9200.00 according to the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator. If you convert that price to a cost per 1000 bytes, it works out to about $1.84. Okay, so what does that mean in everyday terms?

Since a byte is roughly equivalent to the storage space required for a single character, and the nominal average size of a word in the English language is 5 characters, you could store roughly 200 words for that $1.84 in that 1985 megabyte drive. So, for you students the cost to store a 2000 word essay would be just over $18.00

Fast forward to 2010. These days, the storage capacities of hard drives are frequently expressed in terms of gigabytes and terabytes. A one terabyte drive has roughly 200,000 times the storage capacity of that one 5 megabyte drive. (My math skills fail me when I am working with such large numbers but I think I am in the right neighbourhood. Terabyte drives are now available retail at prices in the $200.00 (and less) range.

Using the $200.00 price, that means that the 2000 word essay that once would have cost about $18.00 to store, now costs a tiny fraction of a penny. A 200,000 word thesis would have a storage cost of around 4 cents.

So what does all of this have to do with Windows 7. Because data storage is dirt cheap (sorry there is no other word for it) we tend to store more and more documents electronically. Many people are store vast amounts of music, video, and still photographic images, desktop publications, artwork, project plans, spreadsheet, databases, and much, much more. In short, many people are storing large numbers of documents.

Finding What You Need – Staying Organized

Well, storing all this ‘data’ is find but the stored files are absolutely worthless unless you can find them, quickly and when you need them. And that’s where Windows 7 Libraries come into play.

Quote of the Day:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

-Henry David Thoreau

Most windows users are at least somewhat familiar with the folder system and concept that goes back to Windows 95. To all intents and purposes, documents are stored in folders. Folders themselves may be stored in other folders. Think of the hard drive as a huge file storage warehouse. In that warehouse, there are many file storage rooms. In Windows terms, these rooms are referred to as top-level folders. Inside each of these rooms are filing cabinets (another layer of folders). Inside each filing cabinet are filing drawers (yet another layer of folders) and inside each of these folders are individual documents.

The analogy breaks down a little once you get to the filing drawer level of the physical example. You wouldn’t have a filing drawer within a filing drawer but in the virtual model any folder can theoretically contain yet more folders.

How I Organize My Documents

There are a number of possible ways that you can organize your files. Systematic organization is the key to finding that elusive Word document, or Excel workbook when you need it. The system I’m going to describe works for me. You may have a different approach. If that approach works for you, great! After I describe my current system, I will talk about how Libraries in Windows 7 helps me keep my current system yet makes it easier to find and use the important files I have stored.

I use the Documents (Windows 95 – XP, My Documents) folder as the central location for all my files. Within the documents folder, I have one folder for each type of activity that I am involved with. Part of my work involves the development of custom Access databases and Excel workbooks for clients. My business name is Argee Services so I have one folder in the Documents folder named Argee Development.

Now, when I start to work on a project for a new client. I will create a folder within the Argee Development folder, using the Client’s business name as the folder name. Within that folder, I have one folder for each project I have developed or am working on for that client. Each project folder will have a similar set of folders and documents, including an archive folder for saving interim versions of the project as development proceeds. 

Getting There Isn’t Half the Fun – Windows 7 Libraries to the Rescue

While the system I have described helps keep my client files organized, using the File Open dialogue to locate and open a particular file can be a bit tedious to say the least. I need the files for work in progress project to be readily found. There is less urgency associated with completed projects. In earlier versions of windows, I had a folder named Work in Progress and that folder would contain shortcuts to current projects.

That meant having to create a shortcut to the project and then move the shortcut to the Work in Progress folder. Windows 7 Libraries make this process easier to manage.

Now I have a library named (you guessed it!) Work in Progress. When I start a new project, I add the project folder to the Work in Progress folder. The actual project folder remains ‘physically’ in the Argee Development\Client folder structure. But in the Work in Progress library the project is a top level folder. Working with this virtual folder ‘feels’ exactly like working with the actual folder that ‘lives’ somewhere else in my computer system.

To me, the Libraries concept resembles the Clipart Organizer and Windows Media Player playlists in previous Windows versions. Neither the Clipart Organizer nor the Media Player stored any actual files. A Media Player playlist was actually just a list of paths to the media files. So a playlist could include media files from several different Windows folders.

Similarly, a Windows 7 Library does not contain real folders. It contains shortcuts to the real folders that you want to include in the library. The icon is a folder icon, so it ‘feels’ like you are working with the actual folder. Once you have added a folder to a library, you don’t have give any thought to the actual location of the folder. Just use the library to find the folders and its files when you need to work with them.

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Let’s start with the positives. Features I really like include (in no particular order):

• Libraries
• Start Menu Search Box
• Application Pinning to the Task Bar
• Document Pinning to Application Task Bar Icons
• Open Window Preview Thumbnails

Quote of the day:

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

- Thomas A. Edison

Feature that is a pain, but probably necessary

• User Account Control Settings

… and the negatives (in order of personal impact):

• Networking with non-Windows 7 Machines
• Device Incompatibility

In my next few articles, I will discuss the reasons I like or dislike these features and the impact they have on my daily computing

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  Since I “discovered” OneNote in the Office 2007 suite, it has become an essential tool for me on a daily basis. Microsoft introduced the application with Office 2003 but I completely missed it there.

How does OneNote work for me? Read my article posted on Tuesday in the MVP Award Program Blog and in the Office Blog.

All I can say is, if you haven’t used OneNote yet, what’s keeping you?

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Unhide Row A or Column 1

You may recall this article that talked about how to recover Row A or Column 1 if you have hidden them. Yesteray, Deborah Dalgleish in her Contextures Blog  shows an even easier way to do select a hidden first row or column. Have a look at her short video in this article.

Excel on TechRepublic

Along with this article you will find some excellent links for productivity boosting Excel shortcut key. Well worth a visit. You may need to take out a free membership to view or download some of the articles.

Quote of the Day

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

 

- Jim Bishop

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